Gleanings from the web and the world, condensed for convenience, illustrated for enlightenment, arranged for impact...

While the OFFICE of President remains in highest regard at NewEnergyNews, this administration's position on climate change makes it impossible to regard THIS president with respect. Below is the NewEnergyNews theme song until 2020.

National solar installers are fighting like never before to acquire customers and market-leader SolarCity, which owned 36% of the U.S. market in Q3 2014, is taking it to a new level.

By bringing in Jon Carson, the national field director for President Obama's 2008 campaign, to lead its new sales effort, the national solar installer and funder signaled a new approach to getting referrals.

“It is one thing to have someone show they are interested online and get a few emails and have a nice app they can go to,” Carson said of the websites and social media SolarCity and other national installers now use. “But when people are connected to a SolarCity energy consultant and a team of people, that is when you will see real results.”

It sounds a little more innovative than it really is. SolarCity’s energy consultants are the sales people who are the point of contact for all installers.SunPower’s My Sunpower is comparable to the MySolarCity website that will be Carson’s jumping off point. Most national solar installers’ websites similarly offer toll free phone contacts, online chatting for queries, and free online estimates.

Most leading installers websites also tout the advantages offered by solar leasing, including no upfront costs, no maintenance responsibilities, and a long-term guaranteed low electricity rate. “Need some reasons to choose us?”Sunrun asks before offering references from “60,000 customers” who are “real people really happy about real big savings.”

Most national installers also have active Twitter feeds like SolarCity’s, Facebook accounts like Sungevity’s, and YouTube channels like Sunrun’s.

Carson’s plans

Carson likes the metrics of solar customer acquisition, which is different from his experience in leading the Obama administration’s Organizing For America program. “At OFA, we mobilized thousands and thousands of people around health care,” Carson said. “But can you draw a clear connection to how many people we got signed up for the Affordable Care Act because of that work? You can’t.”

In policy and advocacy, “it can be a little fuzzy. Is all the work we are doing to go after climate science deniers helping or not? If you get 1,000 letters to a Congressman, did it influence him?” Carson asked. “I have never worked on anything with such absolutely clear metrics.” And clear metrics, he explained, “make for great organizing.”

Like Sungevity's Share the Sun program that offers a $500 reward “every time a friend goes solar” whether the referrer is a customer or not, Carson’s ambassadors will get a $250 reward for a referral that leads to a new customer. But Carson wants to use that money and his outreach skills to drive solar growth a little differently.

“I am interested in building teams of ambassadors around their city or their county or their state and feeling like they are working as part of a team,” he said. “There could also be teams competing to direct the most rewards money to non-profit organizations like the local Boys and Girls Club or the PTA.”

Carson sees three ways his experience in organizing will drive success atSolarCity. “You have to have something people are excited about and proud to talk about,” he said. “It is hard to think of something people can be more proud of than producing their own clean electricity right on the roof. I see that box as checked.”

Second, there has to be an easy way to bring people in. That is the technology SolarCity and other installers are already using. And the way his experience will most specifically apply is what made him choose SolarCity over other offers, Carson said.

Social and digital media are like “a butterfly net,” he explained. It gets attention. “But when you connect people to other people in person and build that team spirit and build real human connections, you get big, serious results. That is where our energy consultants come in. They are going to be amazing with these ambassadors.”

They will need to be. Competitors with big resources are pushing hard at SolarCity.

Vivint Solar, a unit of home alarm/energy management system giant Vivint created in 2011 and fresh off a successful billion dollar IPO, has quickly emerged as the second biggest U.S. solar installer by capturing about 15% of the Q2 2014 market.

Vivint Solar is building on Utah-based Vivint’s 15-year-old business modelthat employs thousands of college students in door-to-door commission selling. It is estimated about half of that sales force has difficult-to-discourage Mormon missionary training.

NRG Home/Solar is bringing competition from another direction. Backed by the Fortune 250-level resources of independent power provider NRG Energy and its 53 gigawatt generation portfolio, NRG Solar this year bought Roof Diagnostics Solar (RDS) and Pure Energies Group.

RDS has one of the biggest U.S. solar sales and installation capabilities. Pure Energies is one of the U.S. leaders in online residential solar customer acquisition. Together, they are expected to dramatically raise NRG Solar’s profile as it expands into the U.S.-leading California market.

Solar still provides less than 1% of U.S. electricity, but is expected to surpass 17 gigawatts of cumulative capacity in 2014. There is room for all the players but that isn’t likely to lessen the competition.

“Right now our number one mission is just awareness of the opportunity,” Carson said. He is not worried that creative efforts during the program’s expansion will backfire. “Stuff happens to every organization and every company,” he said. “Some might react by shutting that down. I think that is a mistake when you do the cost-benefit analysis. There are going to be trolls on everything but the benefit of getting people involved far outweighs the risk.”

He also expects his ambassadors to help turn back efforts to erode solar-supporting policies. He expects to see them defending net metering and to be a factor in regulatory proceedings that aim to alter electricity rates in ways that would be unfavorable to solar.

“Before you realize you have an option, your electric bill is just something you pay and you grumble about,” Carson said. “As we get more customers, as we get more solar ambassadors, people are going to understand that there is choice, that there are decisions being made that affect them.”

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades by Mark S. Friedman

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades, the second volume of Herman K. Trabish’s retelling of oil’s history in fiction, picks up where the first book in the series, OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction, left off. The new book is an engrossing, informative and entertaining tale of the Roaring 20s, World War II and the Cold War. You don’t have to know anything about the first historical fiction’s adventures set between the Civil War, when oil became a major commodity, and World War I, when it became a vital commodity, to enjoy this new chronicle of the U.S. emergence as a world superpower and a world oil power.

As the new book opens, Lefash, a minor character in the first book, witnesses the role Big Oil played in designing the post-Great War world at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unjustly implicated in a murder perpetrated by Big Oil agents, LeFash takes the name Livingstone and flees to the U.S. to clear himself. Livingstone’s quest leads him through Babe Ruth’s New York City and Al Capone’s Chicago into oil boom Oklahoma. Stymied by oil and circumstance, Livingstone marries, has a son and eventually, surprisingly, resolves his grievances with the murderer and with oil.

In the new novel’s second episode the oil-and-auto-industry dynasty from the first book re-emerges in the charismatic person of Victoria Wade Bridger, “the woman everybody loved.” Victoria meets Saudi dynasty founder Ibn Saud, spies for the State Department in the Vichy embassy in Washington, D.C., and – for profound and moving personal reasons – accepts a mission into the heart of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Underlying all Victoria’s travels is the struggle between the allies and axis for control of the crucial oil resources that drove World War II.

As the Cold War begins, the novel’s third episode recounts the historic 1951 moment when Britain’s MI-6 handed off its operations in Iran to the CIA, marking the end to Britain’s dark manipulations and the beginning of the same work by the CIA. But in Trabish’s telling, the covert overthrow of Mossadeq in favor of the ill-fated Shah becomes a compelling romance and a melodramatic homage to the iconic “Casablanca” of Bogart and Bergman.

Monty Livingstone, veteran of an oil field youth, European WWII combat and a star-crossed post-war Berlin affair with a Russian female soldier, comes to 1951 Iran working for a U.S. oil company. He re-encounters his lost Russian love, now a Soviet agent helping prop up Mossadeq and extend Mother Russia’s Iranian oil ambitions. The reunited lovers are caught in a web of political, religious and Cold War forces until oil and power merge to restore the Shah to his future fate. The romance ends satisfyingly, America and the Soviet Union are the only forces left on the world stage and ambiguity is resolved with the answer so many of Trabish’s characters ultimately turn to: Oil.

Commenting on a recent National Petroleum Council report calling for government subsidies of the fossil fuels industries, a distinguished scholar said, “It appears that the whole report buys these dubious arguments that the consumer of energy is somehow stupid about energy…” Trabish’s great and important accomplishment is that you cannot read his emotionally engaging and informative tall tales and remain that stupid energy consumer. With our world rushing headlong toward Peak Oil and epic climate change, the OIL IN THEIR BLOOD series is a timely service as well as a consummate literary performance.

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction by Mark S. Friedman

"...ours is a culture of energy illiterates." (Paul Roberts, THE END OF OIL)

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, a superb new historical fiction by Herman K. Trabish, addresses our energy illiteracy by putting the development of our addiction into a story about real people, giving readers a chance to think about how our addiction happened. Trabish's style is fine, straightforward storytelling and he tells his stories through his characters.

The book is the answer an oil family's matriarch gives to an interviewer who asks her to pass judgment on the industry. Like history itself, it is easier to tell stories about the oil industry than to judge it. She and Trabish let readers come to their own conclusions.

She begins by telling the story of her parents in post-Civil War western Pennsylvania, when oil became big business. This part of the story is like a John Ford western and its characters are classic American melodramatic heroes, heroines and villains.

In Part II, the matriarch tells the tragic story of the second generation and reveals how she came to be part of the tales. We see oil become an international commodity, traded on Wall Street and sought from London to Baku to Mesopotamia to Borneo. A baseball subplot compares the growth of the oil business to the growth of baseball, a fascinating reflection of our current president's personal career.

There is an unforgettable image near the center of the story: International oil entrepreneurs talk on a Baku street. This is Trabish at his best, portraying good men doing bad and bad men doing good, all laying plans for wealth and power in the muddy, oily alley of a tiny ancient town in the middle of everywhere. Because Part I was about triumphant American heroes, the tragedy here is entirely unexpected, despite Trabish's repeated allusions to other stories (Casey At The Bat, Hamlet) that do not end well.

In the final section, World War I looms. Baseball takes a back seat to early auto racing and oil-fueled modernity explodes. Love struggles with lust. A cavalry troop collides with an army truck. Here, Trabish has more than tragedy in mind. His lonely, confused young protagonist moves through the horrible destruction of the Romanian oilfields only to suffer worse and worse horrors, until--unexpectedly--he finds something, something a reviewer cannot reveal. Finally, the question of oil must be settled, so the oil industry comes back into the story in a way that is beyond good and bad, beyond melodrama and tragedy.

Along the way, Trabish gives readers a greater awareness of oil and how we became addicted to it. Awareness, Paul Roberts said in THE END OF OIL, "...may be the first tentative step toward building a more sustainable energy economy. Or it may simply mean that when our energy system does begin to fail, and we begin to lose everything that energy once supplied, we won't be so surprised."

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